Two computer vision builds from Cornell

[Bruce Land], professor at Cornell, is a frequent submitter to our tip line. Usually he sends in a few links every semester from undergraduate electronics courses. Now the fall semester is finally over and it’s time to move on to the more ambitious master’s projects.

First up is a head-mounted eye tracker, [Anil Ram Viswanathan] and [Zelan Xiao] put together a lightweight and low-cost eye tracking project that will record where the user is looking.

The eye tracker hardware is made of two cameras mounted on a helmet. The first camera faces forward, looking at the same thing the user is. The second camera is directed towards the user’s eye. A series of algorithms detect the iris of the user’s eye and overlays the expected gaze position on the output of the first camera. Here’s the design report. PDF, natch.

Next up is a face tracking project implemented on an FPGA. This project started out as a software implementation of a face tracking algorithm in MATLAB. [Thu-Thao Nguyen] translated this MATLAB code to Verilog and eventually got her hardware running on an FPGA dev board. Another design report.

Having a face detection and tracking system running on an FPGA is extremely interesting; the FPGA makes face tracking a very low power and hopefully lower-cost solution, allowing it to be used in portable and consumer devices.

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6 thoughts on “Two computer vision builds from Cornell”

There are a lot of eye trackers out there. I did a contract a few years ago on an eye tracker than ran on beagleboard. Suffice it be said, if you use good DSP algorithms implemented carefully, the performance requirements are a lot less than you might think.

This will be useful for these students when they graduate and are making 70k as engineers for a useless product market company. People need fiber-board coffee tables and alarm clocks that change colors and tell weather…

@Bob: It’s easier to implement generic algorithms in a short-turnaround to get investors with low investment..

Sidenote that’s an interesting factoid:
Nguyễn: By some estimates, approximately forty percent of Vietnamese people have this surname.
The prevalence of Nguyễn as a family name in Vietnam extends to outside the country where many Vietnamese people have emigrated. Nguyễn is the seventh most common family name in Australia (second only to Smith in the Melbourne phone books), and the fifty-fourth most common in France. In the United States, it is the fifty-seventh most common family name according to the 2000 Census, as well as the most common exclusively East Asian surname.
Source: wikipedia